Seeing beyond

I have never seen Heaven Admin take offense. At things I would take offense at, he simply doesn't. One way for me to look at it is that he doesn't have ego. And he doesn't.

I also have observed that his conclusions are different from mine. I might think something like this: "How thoughtless that person was. How rude. How ungentlemanly." And in my mind I would list the person's "crimes." And I would be ruffled.

Heaven Admin simply doesn't think that way, and he never gets ruffled. At something that undoubtedly would have bothered me, he would say something like this: "He never learned that. No one ever taught him that." And isn't that true?

That is only one example of how Heaven Admin is always thinking of the other person. Unlike the way I tend to think, he is not thinking about what someone else should have done and how they should have responded -- in order not to ruffle my feathers, that is.

This point was made very clear to me recently. Apparently, it matters very much to me that a man is a gentleman. Apparently, this is one of my key criteria for rightness or wrongness. The person can be wonderful, but if he is not gentlemanly, I sure take note of it. And when someone is gentlemanly, I take note of that too.

Actually there were three  gentlemanly things that a friend did not do right in a row. There was nothing outright rude, you know, rather "sins of omission." And there were the same three gentlemanly things the next day that another friend did do.

All the instances were simply manners, you understand.  It really was clear to me that one of these fine people had simply not learned what the other fine person had learned. He had not been taught what the other person had been taught.

And I thought, "Why don't I just take care of my own manners."

And I thought, "This is what compassion is. It's not all this syrupy stuff. It is just plain understanding. This is what seeing beyond is."

And I thought: "I am learning something that I had never been taught. I am only learning it now."